Lendable Case Study

Finance innovation in emerging markets

Lendable Marketplace is working to bring asset-backed financing to alternative lenders in frontier markets—starting in East Africa. To do this, Lendable creates a clearing-house marketplace that connects investors with capital with originators of loan products who are looking to grow their business. Originators of loan products might be businesses who provide solar panels or boda bodas (motorcycles) to individuals on a lease-to-own model.

Program Quoter Pricing Tool Prototype

Working closely with the product manager who had deep expertise in retained revenue financing models, we defined user needs, determined the narrative arc customized for clients, and iterated through low fidelity prototypes, culminating in a set of high-fidelity designs to hand off to the engineering team.

Design Process

Design Brief

Design a Program Quoting Tool and deal deck that helps potential customers design a custom deal with standard terms for raising upfront capital through the Lendable platform.

Defining User Needs

During user research, we started with live-data prototypes using excel tables and charts in meetings with potential customers. We learned the following insights to help guide the designs.

Key Insights

Design Principles

Customers are not only confused about how to raise capital using receivables financing, they want to reframe it in terms of how it impacts their business

We want to tell a story for clients using their own data inputs

Because it’s a new model, it’s not only hard to understand the impact, it’s hard to articulate that to others—which is needed to gain the sign-off on a financial transation that would impact the whole business.

We want our ‘hero moment’ to be a CEO presenting a deck to their board of advisors and feeling great about how they were able to present a way to help the business.

Much of earning customers’ trust comes down to establishing relationships and presenting well. This is even more pronounced in emerging markets where the power differential is greater.

We want to be clear and transparent about costs and projections

Determining the Narrative Arc

We structured the narrative arc to answer a few questions:

1) What do you get and at what rate?

2) How is your business currently growing?

3) How could your business grow by raising additional capital through selling your portfolio of assets?

4) What is the overall marginal impact of this capital on your bottom line as well as your business impact?

Designing for Data Visualization

We learned that the behavior of the data can sometimes explain to you what words and math might not. Therefore, we used dynamic interactive data visualizations to help users understand the impact of the financing on their business.

Designing for Narrative Clarity

In addition to setting a story arc, we were also intentional about the layout and format of the information. We wanted the story all on one page, with a consistent format that would help guide the users’ conceptual model. To that end, we used components methodically, breaking down sections into digestable chunks and using repeatable UI components for different content types (e.g. interactive vs. presentational vs. explanatory).

Designing for Data Literacy

We iterated through various presentations of the data to answers questions such as rates, cost, growth projections, retained value, and impact.

Extending an Artifact to Users

In addition to an interactive pricing tool, we also wanted to output a customized deal deck that both facilitates logistical actions as well as serves as a tool that helps our CEO customer present the terms of the financing deal to their board.

Low Fidelity Prototypes

Within our process, we had over 10 sets of iterations through wireframes, high-fidelity mocks, and interactive prototypes.